I'm spending 3 months coding the old way | Hacker News

An instructor taught 18-year-olds 6502 assembly on an emulated Apple II Plus using a vintage line editor, then had them build simple graphics programs and a final project.

Students initially hated the limited toolset, but the constraints pushed them to plan more carefully and reason through code before typing.

The post argues that old-school tools can strengthen debugging, mental models, and self-directed problem-solving.

Commenters then debated whether modern LLM-assisted coding makes programmers less persistent, less skilled at debugging, and less satisfied when solving problems themselves.